Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Alabama-based Adtran has become a global leader in supplying equipment for deploying fiber networks, both to the home and to the neighborhood or MDU, as well as allowing copper wire-bound telcos to upgrade those to the kinds of speeds consumers want in 2016 and beyond. And those consumers are worldwide as shown by Adtran’s latest announcement. The Israeli incumbent telco Bezeq Israeli Telecommunication has been using Adtran’s G.fast gear in field trials in one of Israel’s largest, but unnamed, cities. The trial involves different copper loop lengths and their impact on broadband speeds over Adtran’s G.fast architecture, which allows telcos to specify their G.fast chipmaker and the number ports for each DPU (Distribution Point Unit) where fiber and copper to…
There has been a stand-off brewing between the Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) and OpenDaylight – two open source software defined networking (SDN) platforms pushing for network transformation at a massive scale – attracting membership signatures of operators hungry for next generation broadband services. Adding to its growing list of supporters, ON.Lab has recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Broadband Forum to extend its collaborative work to the Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) Project community – an open source reference implementation combining SDN and NFV to bring datacenter economics and cloud agility to the Telco Central Office. ON.Lab, founded by SDN experts from the Universities of Berkeley and Stanford in California, has the mission of creating…
The patent-packed Kudelski Group has announced it has reached agreement with Apple in a case alleging violations of how certain products accessed OTT content on smartphones and PCs, but given the prolific track record of the Swiss content security powerhouse, we probably won’t be waiting very long until the next patent dispute emerges. Kudelski’s OpenTV subsidiary fired the allegations at Apple back in 2014 for violating three of its patents, and following the ruling of a German court in March this year that ruled in favor of OpenTV, Apple was forced to come up with a reasonable deal or risk being forced to disable specific features relating to video streaming on its devices, or remove the infringing products from the…
The tablet market is on the brink of total implosion, but where could it possibly go from here? There are a few conceivable escape routes, but ones that we think can only offer some temporary respite to a breed of device that is destined to fall down at the knees of the smartphone. New research shows that global tablet shipments in Q2 2016 came in at 38.7 million units, down 12.3% from 44.1 million units in the same period last year, according to research from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker, based in the UK. Of course, the first company that comes to mind here is Apple, with the huge implications the declining market will have on…
The past week has seen a number of drone-related news announcements, but the lingering fears of hacking security and fail-safe mechanisms have yet to be dispelled. This week, Amazon won UK approval for open-air testing, Google won FAA clearance in the US for its Project Wing tests, and IBM’s Weather Company has announced an app partnership with Airmap to provide hyper-local weather reporting to pilots. Starting in reverse order, before we get to the prpl Foundation’s President critique of drone security, the IBM deal is a precursor to being able to provide dynamic environmental reports to automated drone navigation platforms – like Amazon’s Prime Air or Google’s Project Wing for example. In its current iteration, the system will push weather…
The last few days have been packed with positioning moves from a number of players in the self-driving vehicle market. The largest seems to have been Uber giving up on its Chinese ambition, but Apple, GM, and Delphi have all made headlines – as the industry sets itself up for an expansion into a new world of automotive opportunities. In terms of dollars, Uber conceding defeat to China’s Didi Chuxing has the biggest immediate impact. Didi claims to hold 87% of the Chinese ride-sharing market, and after launching in 2014, Uber has decided that it’s not worth its time to fight that inertia – and the lack of any profit too. So Uber is selling its Chinese operations to Didi,…
Wearables Jiobit is showing off its child-tracking wearable, which uses BLE, WiFi and GPS to backhaul activity data that is then analyzed by a machine learning cloud application. The end-goal is to create an ‘invisible’ – a wearable so small you won’t notice it. Connected Vehicles Ford’s Sync 3 IVI system will bring support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto to all of Ford’s 2017 models. DHL and Daimler have partnered to allow packages to be delivered to the trunks of Daimler’s Smart cars, in a beta test similar to Volvo’s trial with Urb-it. Daimler is also merging taxi app Hailo with its MyTaxi asset. Mobileye and Tesla are ending their business relationship, with Tesla moving to an internal software…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Amazon has won UK government approval to run drone tests in the country’s airspace, with trials due to begin immediately. WISeKey is merging with fellow Swiss security outfit OpenLimit, and launching a partnership with SAP to target IIoT applications running in SAP’s HANA Cloud. Ericsson has signed China Telecom up to its Device Connection Platform (DCP), in an MoU to offer enterprise M2M and IoT connections to global customers. Analog Devices is acquiring Linear Tech for $14.8bn, a 24% premium. The Thread Group and the Open Connectivity Foundation (formerly the OIC) have announced an interoperability partnership. STMicro is acquiring ams’ NFC and RFID assets for $77m with up to a $37m bonus. Uber is merging its Chinese…
US set top and cable equipment vendor Arris came out with Q2 revenue of $1.73 billion, up $470 million, or 37% compared to this quarter last year, after the acquisition of UK firm Pace and up 7% over the immediate past quarter. Arris recorded an $84 million net income, had an order backlog of $1.24 billion and cash of $902 million after generating $261 million of cash in the quarter. Amazon Video says it is planning to launch its streaming partners program in Europe according to job specs it has advertised, initially targeting the UK and Germany, pushing subscription content. In the US in December Amazon allowed Prime Members to subscribe to Showtime, Starz, and other OTT content through the…
Pretty much wherever you see OTT services springing up, at some point down the road it turns out that they are customers of Elemental Technologies for their encoding. Canada’s Shomi, which started out as a tied VoD service to Rogers and Shaw’s pay TV service, is no exception. This week Elemental said that Shomi is using Elemental Cloud and other Amazon components for delivery. Shomi was conceived, as so many services are, as a way of keeping Netflix at bay. What usually happens in these situations – and it’s happened with Sky in the UK, services in Germany and at Canal+ in France – is that the new service becomes a success, but it doesn’t halt the emergence of Netflix…
Last week the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) submitted a lawsuit against the US government for violations of copyright law laid out in the First Amendment – this is the freedom of speech amendment. The case involves the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), introduced in 1998, and more specifically boils down to the DRM technologies designed to tackle piracy – or in the EFF’s view, not tackling piracy at all. The EFF believes that the DMCA and the DRMs involved are unlawfully restricting access to legally-purchased copyright material such as movies and music, as well as the software that devices and appliances are built on. The consequences of this could be huge, as the World Copyright Treaty is based on the…
Apple’s latest results look quite brutal at first glance, with a 27% fall in quarterly profits to $7.8 billion, and a 15% slip in revenues to $42.4 billion for Q2. However, Apple CEO Tim Cook has waved off any suggestion of failure by clinging on to the results coming in above the frankly poor expectations, and as a result, Wall Street has bumped up its share price by more than 7% following the earnings release. Wall Street too is in a state of denial. It was well publicized that Apple had a poor start to 2016, with the significant Q1 results marking the first drop in revenues and profits of the iPhone era, and its first ever year-on-year fall for…
The UK may have voted to leave the European Union, but its regulator is still pioneering new territory that may lead all of Europe to follow it. Its proposal issued this week, after numerous government comments complaining about BT Openreach, will make Openreach a very arms-length company from BT. It could be the first European Union regulator which breaks up its incumbent telco, in order to regulate its broadband market. But political solutions to technology problems rarely get it right and Ofcom seems to have completely missed the point on this one – instead of “booing” BT as the pantomime villain, and heralding the new and wonderful Openreach, what will happen is that the two companies will reverse their roles…
The Thread Group and the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF – formerly the Open Interconnect Consortium), have announced an interoperability partnership that sees the two groups promise to advance the adoption of connected home products – which is good news given the slow pace of Thread certification. This is an expansion from Thread’s current reliance on ZigBee, which Thread had previously vaunted for the application layer processes that are missing from the Thread protocol. By moving towards the OCF, Thread is definitely giving itself another option for the higher layers of the OSI stack. A joint roadmap was announced in May, that should see a ZigBee-Thread test and certification program launched in Q3 of this year. The Thread Group also announced…
Opera Software is to sell part of its consumer business to the Chinese Kunqi consortium, but plans for a sale of its whole business to that group have fallen through. The consortium is led by private equity firm Golden Brick Silk Road and also includes Beijing Kunlun Tech, Qihoo 360 Software and Yonglian Investment. Kunlun distributes Angry Birds in China and recently acquired a majority stake in dating app Grindr; while Qihoo is a security software and app store provider. The Chinese buyer would get Opera’s mobile browser business, including its still-lengthy list of co-branding arrangements with operators, especially in emerging markets; plus the desktop browsers; performance and privacy apps; Opera’s technology licensing business (except Opera TV); and its 29.09%…
The FCC has published its final list of bidders for the much-anticipated 600 MHz auction in the US, totaling no fewer than 62 bidders. These will enter the bidding war in just a few weeks’ time, and they include all the usual suspects, but with a few surprise names in the hat. However, the whopping total of $86.4bn requested by the broadcasters who are selling the spectrum, for the full 126 MHz available, has sparked concerns that telecom operators won’t be overly keen on spending such a sum on low band spectrum – which may result in a second round of reverse auction bidding for less spectrum at reduced prices. “The auction is a market-based mechanism for matching supply with…
A group of heavyweight players in the world of digital security, including ARM, Intercede, Solacia and Symantec, have announced the Open Trust Protocol (OTrP). Not only does this aim to consolidate fragmented IoT (Internet of Things) security efforts into a single framework, but it aims to bring the mission critical security techniques used in banking and e-commerce, to the IoT and its billions of end-points. Others signing the OTrP Joint Stakeholder Agreement include Beanpod, Sequitur Labs, Sprint (part of SoftBank, as ARM is likely to be soon), Thundersoft, Trustkernel and Verimatrix. The group collectively assessed the security challenges facing the IoT, including the Industrial IoT (IIoT), smart home, healthcare, and transportation, and concluded that any system could be compromised unless…
Qualcomm and Intel seem like a weather house these days – if one basks in the sunshine of a good quarter, the other is cast into the shadows of disappointing results. This time, it was Intel’s turn to turn in poor figures, with only a 5% growth in its critical server processor business, while Qualcomm was reminiscent of another childhood toy – the Weebles, creatures best known for their ability to wobble, but never fall down. After a difficult 2015, overshadowed by Chinese and smartphone market pressures, Qualcomm has bounced back with a storming quarter which seems to defy the stagnation of its own core market. All these surprises bring into question the assumptions on which the chip giants have…
Despite all the work on standards and openness – sometimes because of it – both telco network and IT vendors, which are battling to take the leadership role in virtualization/SDN, are dealing with a difficult transition period. Carriers are dialling down their capex investments in physical networks as they prepare to shift to the different economics of a software-driven network – based more heavily on opex and data center or cloud investments. But these programs are generally immature and will not account for large budgets – except in a few cases like AT&T – for several years at least. To make things worse for network OEMs, while operators will still have to invest in physical kit at their cell sites…
The sort of progress seen at AT&T, with its Domain 2.0 SDN program, is important to show others what can be done, but it does not make a fully-fledged market delivering huge revenues to suppliers. That is going to require the three essentials outlined above, and this week saw AT&T partnering with Orange to try to accelerate the process. The two companies aim to accelerate the availability of interoperable NFV/SDN systems and so to improve their own economics and assert leadership of how this critical platform evolves. This is a role several other operators are chasing, notably by submitting their MANO (management and orchestration) specifications to industry groups as potential de facto standards (China Mobile’s OPEN-O or Telefonica’s OpenMANO are…